Digital Exile: How I Got Banned for Life from Airbnb (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Digital Exile: How I Got Banned for Life from Airbnb (2018)

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82 pointsjnbiche57 comments

Older thread on same post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17523056

This is a wake up call. Whether it's Apple App Store, Google (which includes nearly everything else - Play Store, Gmail, Gsuite/Gdocs), Facebook, and even Amazon (in far fewer cases) - the giants can afford to choose a policy that is most financially efficient. The business cost to review each case is simply not worth it financially. Only until a critical mass of angry/banned users exists, there will be no change.

It's unfortunate that it takes posting to HN or Twitter in the hopes that an employee of one of those companies will see it and champion the cause of the user.

Airbnb has had problems with people finding out where hosts work, where they have other business etc and leaving offsite reviews for airbnb stays on those platforms.

My question - would you rent out a room in your house for a night if someone starts leaving crappy reviews about you everywhere? Many people would not.

I think Airbnb AND homeowners should carry much more liability for some of the fraud on Airbnb, so I hope to see airbnb paying big penalty bucks in the future.

Airbnb likely dislikes third party reservations, offsite payments and offsite bookings for business reasons as well. I wouldn't be surprised if folks going off-site are asked not to participate on-site - fair or not.

I 100% believe the authors side of this charade, and I think the answer to the hypothetical goes something like this:

1. 90% of Airbnb hosts are not going to run into that problem because they’re going to do everything to make it right, so to fear it would be akin to being worried about getting hit by lightening.

2. 10% of Airbnb hosts are psychotically delusional and create problems, do nothing to fix them, and empowered by Airbnb, leave the only remaining outlet as off-site reviews. These people don’t have any business renting property.

So that is to say — the “problem” of off-site reviews is a secondary repercussion of Airbnb letting nearly anyone rent their places, and then not doing enough to prune bad hosts out. It’s a fundamental misalignment in their business model to tilt this heavily towards hosts, because hosts have illiquid property in mostly crowded markets (expendable) while customers have extremely liquid capital and lots of choice.

Having run into nutty hosts (and before that landlords) would you as a guest feel good if one of those hosts started posting negative reviews about you offsite based on your stay at Airbnb?

Ie, if their only outlet for a guest that "created problems" "did nothing to fix them" was off-site reviews?

I've found folks with the approach of I should be able to slam you publicly react TERRIBLY when they themselves start receiving off-site reviews. And I've found the nutty hosts / nutty guests often have the most time to pursue things like off-site reviews as an "outlet" for their aggression.

I have stopped saying at airbnb when traveling except for big group trips and paying for very premium places because the quality of hosts is problematic as you describe, and airbnb should ABSOLUTELY shut down the false advertising hosts (extra charges after / poorly disclosed "rules", cameras in all the rooms etc). But I do have an outlet, I book a nice room at a hotel - a very predictable experience! And I'm not the only one.

I probably wouldn’t feel great (and I wouldn’t post negatively either), but who’s running the business and receiving money and who is spending money? Paying money to get blasted would be a new low yet being a business and getting blasted is kinda a time-honored situation. This actually is kinda aligned with what I’m talking about because the bad owners don't realize they’re running a business when they rent their property, and their problems are caused by not caring about what businesses have to care about, which is reputation and value of name.

But yeah overall agreed, esp. about who has the time & energy to go ballistic about these things and the long realization that this is why hotels are a much better place to spend money.

I'm less confident that an airbnb "business" might not go off-site to slam customers. We already have regular businesses suing yelp users etc for bad reviews even if factual.

I'm not a huge fan of the hunt people down across the net and in real life to destory them modern approach to problems - even if you as a user claim you need the "outlet".

Someone shows up to your airbnb in Berkeley wearing a trump hat. You're telling me no Berkeley hosts would go slamming these guests as racists online if they could?

Someone shows up down south on vacation with their partner but hasn't yet come out yet as gay - has a bad host interaction with someone bigoted - if airbnb allowed off-site reviews you are sure no one would out this couple?

I get the urge to publicly destroy people, just realize there may be folks with opinions different than yours who may then want to spend time trying to destroy you.

> But let’s call it like it is. This policy leverages the company’s power over the individual user to a cruel and unprecedented extent.

As a host, when I listed on AirBnB I was completely at their mercy in terms of where I'd show up in the listing ranking and they also had a rule that you can't be a superhost if you decline some percent of bookings - i.e., they decide who you host, not you. After declining a string of suspicious bookings (and having to list at a giveaway price just to be anywhere near the top of the rankings), I decided to just give up completely on the platform. Craigslist is better, where I can at least interview someone.

I got blocked from accessing a Gmail account half year ago during a long term stay in another continent and despite knowing the password, answering the security question I'm still not able to access nor recover it as i can't recall the date of creating the account (it's too old to recall exact month/year combo). There is nothing you can do in this situation, nowhere to complain, whole identity tied to the account is gone. I'm losing belief i can access it one day..

Anyway, this was a wake up call and since then I'm in progress of migrating all my services outside big players..

They’re really going overboard with these security questions. This is why I use ProtonMail.

Getting banned, and not getting any explanation from support sucks big times. Hope someone from Airbnb Support reads this and can help out.

The truth is that he doesn't know why he was banned. Could have been a bug. Could have been something he did. Could have been the host knows someone at airbnb and got the guest banned. It doesn't really matter. Amazon does the same thing. Google does the same thing. Uber does the same thing. Yeah, people can argue companies can do business with whomever they want and blah blah (blah blah because the argument simply boils down to everything legal is fine) but the reality is that many of these services are essential for some people and we as a society need to start treating them as such. We should require clear explanations from such businesses at the very least. Otherwise, how do we know they are not breaking the law? Maybe they banned the author because they didn't like his ethnicity or gender or some other protected status. I do not see why we should give corporations such rights of refusal when we cannot police them to make sure that the rights are being used properly. I don't understand why we as a society don't make the corporations work for us rather than making us, the people, a slave to the corporation. In theory, we can do either. Reality is another story, of course.

I'd suggest lawyering up but even banks in the US routinely close peoples accounts without offering any explanation or recourse so it would be surprising if such arbitrariness could be successfully fought in court.

More and more businesses are trying (as gets discussed here from time to time) to force you to 'agree' to private arbitration and give up your right to sue, including class actions suits. You might be able to laboriously opt-out, but it hard to just say 'I won't use those services' because it almost universal.

I helped my son open up a toy for Christmas. Inside the box was an arbitration agreement. I am wondering how they think that works when I have not signed something.

We’re becoming increasingly dependent on a handful of major tech giants to get through our basic daily routine.

Well there's your problem right there.

> Moving forward, I question whether these types of suspensions should be allowed from the tech giants without any oversight or regulation.

There is an industry based on providing short term lodging for people that is subject to oversight and regulation. Businesses operating in this industry are usually called "hotels".

On one hand you're correct, on the other there's all sorts of industries that still exist even though they have been 'disrupted', but I'm guessing if you relied on one of the disrupters for a service and were banned you might not be so cavalier in your attitude - this is based on my never having read of anyone being banned from one of these services unfairly and taking it in the calm stride you're recommending.

And yet hotels can and do permanently ban guests from their property all the time with no recourse, so I'm not sure what your implication is.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25243594/ns/travel-travel_tips/t/h...

Just as with cryptocurrencies ("What do you mean my net worth just evaporated and I have no recourse!?"), it's somewhat humorous to witness platform enthusiasts demand the very regulation platforms subverted to grow to what they are today.

Your point stands though; businesses have the right to turn away customers for any reason that isn't discriminatory or class protected.

Perhaps there's a reason to consider regulating certain platforms as utilities once they reach a certain scale? (Not referring to AirBnB in this case)

If they are not required by law to provide the reasons and some context, it is difficult to assess if they are discriminatory or class protected.

Astute observation as it relates to a gap in legislation and regulation that could use some fixing up. An Ombudsman to handle disputes such as these would be a welcomed development.

I don't consider myself a platform enthusiast, but I do find myself annoyed at people who call for regulation of tech companies because its trendy.

People are outraged Airbnb can ban you without recourse -- tech must be regulated! Not a peep against hotel giants who can do the same thing

People are outraged that Amazon wants to build an HQ2 in NYC because it'll displace people and must be stopped! Not a peep that it's home to the headquarters of 52 Fortune 500 companies already and grows by tens of thousands of people a year.

People are outraged that Apple paid little in income tax on a huge profit last year and tech must be regulated! Not a peep about Chevron, Delta, or Halliburton.

It's just populism. People know and interact brands like Google, Apple, Airbnb, etc so they're easy targets, and as a result we're going to end up with regulation that narrowly targets that high profile offenders without doing anything to solve the broader root cause issues. California's AB5 is a perfect example -- it's basically meant to target Lyft/Uber/etc and exempts many industries for no reason: hair salons, insurance brokers, real estate agencies, photographers, fishermen, and more. Why? Because they want to specifically target the big bad tech companies without fundamentally fixing the problem of ensuring all workers get a living wage.

Even if you think the complaints are due to "trendiness" or "populism", there a more non-tech folks than not. It's plain math (tech is a vocal minority), the regulation will get here eventually (as has happened with Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, and is likely to happen to larger tech firms in the future). As a tech professional, I believe more regulation over tech in general is long overdue. With leverage comes responsibility and oversight.

True, but for whatever reason, they don't -- and I have a hard time imagining one that would -- say, "Hey we're banning you and we're not telling you why and we're not alerting you to the violation as we become aware of it and not giving you a chance to correct the behavior."

Sure, I suppose nothing legally stops them, I guess, but it just doesn't seem to happen. (Perhaps there is a legal barrier, where they try to leave a defensible paper trail so as to show it wasn't e.g. racially motivated, but then, I don't know why such concerns don't spur similar behavior from Airbnb.)

There's no way that companies should be allowed such total and irreversible control, especially if they effectively control so much real estate

Airbnb controlls zero real-estate, it's a coordination and payment mechanism, that's all.

I believe the word effectively is used in the parent comment to indicate the control is through coordination and payment mechanisms.

This isn't about economics. This is about power. We used to understand that power is an incredibly dangerous thing. This country was founded on the principle of diffusing power: no one person should have unilateral authority over the lives of millions of people. Consequently, our government is set up to pit ambitious people against each other and make them accountable to the public. It's worked for hundreds of years.

Why shouldn't we apply the principle of separation of powers to corporations that can harm millions of people? Once a company becomes so large that it becomes an integral part of society (and I think Airbnb now qualifies) it should be subject either to regulation (to diffuse power and make the company accountable to public via the state) or split up (to diffuse power and make the company accountable to the public via the market). Consider it a lifetime achievement prize. The overriding principle here is that no one person should have the amount of power of individual lives that the CEO of an essential monopoly has.

>This isn't about economics. This is about power.

What part of economics isn't about power?

> What part of economics isn't about power?

Economics is about power in the sense that chemistry is about particle physics. I mean, yeah, sure, that kind of analysis is technically admissible, but it's not useful because there are important emergent phenomena in the higher-level system (economics, chemistry) that become impossibly cumbersome modeled directly in the language of the lower-level system (individual incentives, particle physics).

It's not particularly productive to apply the language of political science to things like Ricardo's examination of land rents. My point is that as companies become very large, the high-level phenomenon start to break down and we need to begin using the lower-level machinery to make sense of the problem in the extreme space. For example, the interior of neutron star is best understood by referencing physical effects directly. Likewise, when an economy has consolidated to the point that we basically have one giant company per economic sector, it starts being more useful to look at the situation through the lens of history and politics than through the lens of pure economics.

For a user in EU it should be possible to work around such ban.

First make a GDPR request to have your data deleted.

After som grace period, register again. If they tell you that you are banned, they show that they have not deleted the data. File a complaint with data protection authorities and have them fined.

Of course the better answer is just not to do any business with shitty companies.

This "clever hack" isn't how the GDPR works at all. In the first place, sufficiently pseudonymous data--that is, data that cannot by itself be used to reveal a specific, non-anonymous user--need not be deleted. (Hashing a ban list based on the personal and immutable information required at signup is an example of this, though discarding that information is.) Beyond that, the GDPR includes protections for companies against "manifestly unfounded" requests; while one must use this as an affirmative defense, a request to delete the record that that user has been banned from the service is a prime example of such things.

I do wish that software people sometimes bothered to extend a baseline level of competence to other people once in awhile, though. Like--do you think nobody thought of this situation?

I guess the hashed ban list is reasonable solution. Actually looking at Airbnb you can register three ways - via FaceBook, Google, or via Email address. Signing via Email requires Email, first name, and birth date. I suppose if someone wanted to beat the ban they could do it at least 3 times.

Without even looking I can bet that they require identity and email when you log in via a social provider too.

The better option is likely a set of hashes of various permutations of data, though, with some set of hits prompting for further information (such as an e-mail or a full name match requiring proof of identity before allowing usage).

Maybe but given that probably your verification at some point will involve an email account I think you could use GPDR to remove all personal info, and then use a new email address to sign up and get through.

However if they could do something like use your credit card info to identify you and have a hash of that - until you changed bank etc.

At any rate I don't think it is impossible to beat the ban.

Of course. It's rarely, if ever, impossible to make a perfect ban on an online services. You just make it sufficiently difficult. Requiring some real hard identification information if a user trips your "maybe" filter is enough effort for the 99.9% case.

Such hashing does not seem straight-forward to me. If you make it very exact, it's easy to get around. Use another email address, use a prepaid phone card, insert a middle initial, spell the street address slightly different and the hash will not match.

The more fuzzy you make it ("normalizing" the data before calcukating the hash), the more likely it will cause a false positive for legitimate users.

It's probably only a matter of time until we read articles on HN where such an algorithm got it wrong.

Even better you can make a subject access request (SAR) to Airbnb and get the internal communications about the person in question.

I like how 'catered eggs benny' is the dispute resolution go-to. The new millennium has really come of age

This will keep happening as long as there's no cheap 3rd-party dispute arbitration. E-commerce has gotten super cheap and transactional but arbitration needs to catch up

s/arbitration/voluntary arbitration/g and you would have my upvote.

The point is really company size and/or monopoly. If I don't like my barber's service I go the next one.

But if I don't like Google and don't have an iPhone there there a many things that I cannot do because every business assumes you can run their apps.

If I don't like Airbnb, renting holiday accommodations can be quite limited because many properties are not available on alternative channels.

Boeing has failed badly, but they are considered too big to fail. The problem is not limited to digital services.

I think the only solution is what happened to AT&T decades ago. If a company's market share is too big, they need to be split up by government intervention.

Companies with monopoly power[1] shouldn’t be able to be people without some appeals process. That said, I don’t know what that would look like or if Airbnb even should be subject to it. Other services and hotels are still viable alternatives for most cases.

By contrast, Google banning people is more of a problem due to the wide variety of services they offer. The traditional approach of breaking up large companies seems sufficient if one wanted to address what a problem it is to get banned by them.

[1] With 40% market share as the threshold for possible monopoly scrutiny, like the European Commission suggests.

Would AirBnB be a monopoly even at 40%? Maybe (likely?) in home or room share, but they are competing against hotels and probably wouldn't have a 40% stake of that market. Or maybe I am underestimating how big they have got?

>Companies with monopoly power[1] shouldn’t be able to be people without some appeals process.

>Other services and hotels are still viable alternatives for most cases.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25243594/ns/travel-travel_tips/t/h...

Why are you singling out Airbnb and not Hilton, IHG, Marriott, or Hyatt?

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